#186 Mail-Right Show: Guerrilla Marketing At Low Cost For Real Estate Agents

Subscribe: RSS

We discuss some great and low cost digital marketing strategies for creating seller leads from your sphere of influence using guerrilla marketing methods.

Jonathon: Welcome back folks to the Mail Right Show. This is episode 186. I’ve got my great cohost, Robert Newman with me. And what we’re going to be discussing in this episode is gorilla marketing. Gorilla marketing techniques that you could do for around $50. So not too expensive. And my cohost is a little bit ill, but he still decided to join me on the show. So he gets full marks for that. Robert, would you like to introduce yourself quickly to the new listeners and viewers?

Robert: Yeah. So first of all, thank you for all those people that have been tuning in. Our numbers keep going up and John and I rare really gratified by that. You can learn more about me if you’d like to on my website, inboundrem.com. I do really deep dives into technology reviews. I only publish about four articles per year, so it’s not. But I do have about 70 videos that I’ve done over the last two and a half years. And you can probably find a lot of good stuff there if you’re trying to review things to make your real estate marketing go a little bit better for your business.

Jonathon: So it’s a feast of knowledge folks. I go over to his website. And I’ve got all the videos of the podcasts. We video our interviews as well folks. And we have some episodes. We have bonus content, which you can only see through the video. But that varies, depending on how will we are or we are just running out of things to say. So Robert Guerrilla Marketing 50 to a hundred dollars. How are we going to start the conversation, Robert?

Robert: Well, we’re going to start with ideas. So first of all, I want for our listeners to understand that when I say guerrilla marketing, almost everything I ever focus on is going to be digital. By digital, I mean something you can do online. This particular podcast, I really have a definitive focus for it. I feel like the information that I’m about ready to give you is going to be best for new realtors or marketing assistants. Or people that are in the office who might want to try to do something to in their spare time or trying to make a good impression on their boss. Or their trying to come to an idea because their bosses are assigned them the task to do marketing. And they don’t know if.

Jonathon: Go forth and do marketing.

Robert: Right. Well, I believe me. I’ve gotten my fair share calls from assistance they’ve gotten exactly that directive from their boss. And there are also a fair number of college students in such that are kind of tasked with doing digital marketing. Who are not marketers, but since they’re young, they’re real estate bosses often times just say, hey, you know this stuff, go do it. So here’s what my idea is, we’re going to start off, with Instagram and Facebook, which are really basically the same thing. But two of my favorite ways to do a sphere marketing using Instagram and Facebook, and you can use, utilize both these ideas. Usually I can get pretty good reach for about $50 or less. It really does depend on how many Facebook likes you have, but Facebook allows you to market to friends of friends.

So if your Facebook page has, let’s just say a hundred likes and let’s see, you’re pretty sure that the a hundred likes are all either your likes or the realtor likes. Well, that sphere of influence is actually more like three to 5,000 people. It adds up very, very fast because the average Facebook user has about 150 friends. I have a thousand. And you can market to all of those people. So what would you market to those people, assuming that you could? Well, one of the things that I like to do a lot is recent listings. Okay. So if you did this tactic is almost always done, is best when you have a listing. Even better if you have what’s called a pocket listing. For those of you that might not know what that is, that is listing that you haven’t necessarily put out on the mls or everywhere else as of yet.

It’s something the only you have. So you might do an initial blast where you say, this is an exclusive listing. Nobody’s got it yet. It’s going out to my friends and the friends of my friends. And then you click that button on Facebook. And the cost to do this kind of marketing is usually something like 10 cents per click. So you’re looking at an extraordinarily cheap way to get out of property in front of a whole bunch of people that may not have seen it. Now the funny thing is, is that this tactic also works almost in exact same way on Instagram. Because Instagram allows you to put a listing and then you can also promote it to your followers. Now, I don’t think, and I’m not sure about this, but I don’t think the Instagram yet has the followers of your followers’ kind of tactic.

But I may be wrong about, but regardless, this same listing will automatically propagate to your Facebook feed. So actually you can get a double bang for your buck by promoting the listing on two separate platforms and only doing the data entry once. So that is a really good, really inexpensive way. Now, why, there are a couple of other reasons why you might want to do this. It’s actually a better tactic than just selling the listing. You can also say, hey, if you would like see more exclusive homes from me, but you’re not in the market right now, do me a favor and like my Facebook page. Why would you do that? Because it expands your Facebook reach. And like I said its 10 cents a click. So think of it this way. You’re adding a name to your list for 10 cents, which is a great way to get in front of a brand new audience and to grow your sphere of influence using Facebook and Instagram for an incredibly low amount of money.

So, that’s how I would leverage Facebook and Instagram. Now let’s say for sake of argument that you don’t have a listing. So what else might you do? So the next tactic that you might do is actually picking something in a target neighborhood that you like. And retool the language just a little bit and basically say, this is a beautiful listing that I really like is opposed to this is an exclusive listing because it’s not your listing. But hey, guess what? You’re a realtor. You can pick anything you want off the off the mls for listing agent has already listed the property. So well what you do is you take their property and you’d put it do the same tactic. And just explain though what you, what you really like about the property.

Make sure that you understand what it is that you’re listing, like what you’re throwing up. Maybe even go drive by it and take a deep walk, like a walking tour around the property. And then what you want to do is you want to really point out some things that you legitimately like about the property first and Instagram than on Facebook. And basically make yourself an expert for this particular listing and advertise it like you, like it’s your home. Like, hey, I love this house. The backyard is beautiful. So on and so forth. And again, the tactic is going to be doing the same thing. It’s just going to be growing your sphere of influence number one and two. If you get very, very lucky, you’re going to get somebody to respond to your ad. Now here are a couple of pointers. Always have a call to action.

You do not need a website for this tactic. Like I said, this is real gorilla marketing stuff. Put your phone number on Facebook, make sure that you have an email address, and make sure you have a clear call to action. And that could be two things that could be, I’m willing to show the property next Saturday or call me on this number. So that’s one gorilla marketing tactic. Now, I almost always, always, always, always stick with kind of like digital marketing strategies. But I’ve been doing business with realtors for 12 years. And somebody that I know does this with a really enormous degree of success. So when they do get a listing and they do advertising in a neighborhood and they do a Facebook post, what they also do, which I think is kind of clever, is they basically go do a bake off.

And what they do is they bring in some baked goods. They set up a Saturday, they run out, they take a card and they hand it off to all the neighbors. The like, and they go a couple blocks and they just, they leave the card and basically say, hey, on Saturday, next Saturday, I just want you to know I’m going to have some baked goods that I’ve handmade at such and such an house and such an address. What did they do that? Because this particular realtor who is, I have to admit a realtor in back East. But they get most of their business from referrals from people in the neighborhood. In other words, people that already live there may know somebody that they want to move into the neighborhood. So we know that somebody who lives down the street is not going to buy the house, not most likely.

But what we don’t know is that maybe they’ve gotten an aunt, uncle, brother, sister, mother, cat, dog with money, who knows. But they’ve got somebody that they wanted to live near them. And they will call that person up and say, hey, there’s this baked goods or breakfast or whatever happening at this house. Maybe she’d spend by and check it out. They say that most of the highly qualified leads that they get are done using this tactic and it’s just either them or their assistant walking the neighborhood, dropping these cards. And again, this is under 50 bucks. It’s just you can go to Kinko’s and for $20 you make the flyers. The problem is of course that you have to have the listing, but still it’s a relatively, you can actually take your listing off the mls and do the same strategy if you want. I personally don’t think it’s quite as powerful as it your listing.

Jonathon: I think that also I’m more established agents love you if you volunteer to do open house for them. And you can do the same technique where they are and nothing. Another thing that I think what I am trying to say is. I’m sure you correct me if I’m wrong. Am I correct is when a house gets sold normally between three and four other houses in a certain distance get sold in less than a year. It normally generates other houses to come on the market in their area. So that’s another reason why gives in them what you’ve just said or getting them to open house for the new agent that hasn’t got a lot of listings. Such as why doing open houses is a good idea. Is that for the reason I have just stated. And I think a lot of them don’t realize they do there Robert.

Robert: I would agree with you. I think the natural inclination people when they like buying and selling homes. Because you’re exactly right is to say, look what my neighbor’s house went for. I had no idea that my house could go for that much. Like right now, I think like five, 10 years ago when I leased the place I’m at now, it was going for 550. Currently the houses in this neighborhood are going for 665. Over the span of just a handful of years. I’m kind of glad that my owner is absolutely determined to give this house to his kids because if he wasn’t, I think he’d look at it and goes, Holy Shit, how I bought that thing for 55,000, 30 years ago. So why not sell it for $600,000 profit? A couple of other things to talk about.

I’m going to switch gears and everybody here. So, so I’m going to talk about active rain for a second. Active rain as a real estate only blogging platform. You can get a free profile that will allow you to blog and your blog will be read by other people that are on the platform. In other words, only people that aren’t active rain or people that you send to the blog. So why would you blog there? Why would I even bring it up? Well, because you can create a blog and you can do that all for free and then you can basically say seeking networking partners. That’s the title of the blog posts. Then you put all of the information about your area and you basically agreed to do a swap. This is very popular in active rain. If you actually stayed on the platform and built up a blog and built up a reputation, you’d be surprised. I think in under six months and blogging about twice, twice a month.

You could probably build up a fairly active referral network where people are willing to send some referrals your way from people that might be moving out of their area and into yours. It’s another kind of super guerrilla marketing. You will have to spend some time doing the strategy. But I know active rain, the bloggers who have referral networks that they’d been milking for 10 years. And most of the time it’s not a strategy that’s so powerful that it’s going to change your business. But I do know quite a few people that get like extra three, four transactions a year consistently off active rain. As a matter of fact, I think Thomas your previous host on the show. I met him on active rain. And he was telling me that he’s gotten a few transactions off active rain. At least I think he did. I think he said he got a few referrals off active rain I may be wrong.

Jonathon: I think it’s also depending on what area in. I am amazed that the area that I live. You got Truckee, you got Lake Tahoe, there two kind of high class areas where a lot of people from outside the area buy property. So I’m a guest at the man of agents in this area that haven’t done that at all. So if you are in this kind of area where you get a lot of people from the bay area looking to buy in Truck or Lake Tahoe. You think they would do that, wouldn’t you? But they don’t. It’s quite amazing really Robert.

Robert: Yeah. I couldn’t agree with that. I couldn’t agree with that more now.

Jonathon: Oh, so sorry. Just to finish off on that, it’s dependent on how many referrals you get, the kind of area you live in. See in Carson city, Carson city is not somewhere where a lot of outside, well I better not say that it’s not correct. We getting increasingly amount of people from California retired to Carson city. But what it used to be is a lot of people worked for the state government in Carson City. Basically because it is the state capital and then they used to retire here. So it didn’t use to have a lot of outside people buying property. So in the last recession it was a much more stable market that didn’t show the declines in pricing. I am the amount defaulting in Reno and some other areas. That`s also changing now. I’m noticing that we get to more outside people buying property because Truckee, parts of Reno, Lake Tahoe has gotten so expensive that they’re pricing themselves out. So people were looking at alternative areas in northern Nevada.

Robert: Let’s do the break and then one last tip, to do for the last few minutes of our show. One last guerrilla marketing tip.

Jonathon: That’d be great. We’re going to go for a break. I’m sure I’ll probably have some tips as well. So come back with us and we got some more guerrilla marketing techniques. For you listeners and viewers. We will be back in a few moments.

Announcer: Do you want quality leads from homeowners and buyers right in your own neighborhood? Then you need Mail Right. It is a powerful but easy to use online marketing system that uses Facebook to generate real estate leads and a fraction of the cost you’d pay from our competition. We stand behind our work with a no question asked, 30 day money back guarantee. So don’t delay, get started today. Go to mail-right.com

Jonathon: We’re coming back, Robert`s not well. He is slowly dying. But he has managed to kind of not show the effect of his slow death to us listeners and viewers. So on to your next one, what’s your next Gorilla technique Robert?

Robert: This is one of my favorites. Unfortunately it’s only really good for people that have been focusing on social media. But it might give you the goalpost of understanding why you want to focus on social media. So Facebook live. John and I both talked about this repeatedly. So this is not a new tactic. It’s really more us bringing up a favorite old tactic. It’s one of the only ways that Facebook and Instagram are still allowing you to leverage your list. Because a lot of people don’t know this, but really for the most part, Facebook has shut down access to your Facebook marketing page without paying them. They don’t allow you to simply like, it used to be in the old days that you could come on to Facebook and if you posted something, everybody would get notified that was part of your followers.

That’s not the way it works anymore. I don’t know that anybody gets notified when you put a post-up. What you have to do is pay them and then they’ll send out a notification to everybody saying that you have a post on your Facebook page. But because live is still a very hotly contested feature that’s being, that is YouTube, Instagram and Facebook are the big three that are fighting in that arena. They’re still giving you access to most of your audience during live now they’re switching up how that works. I’ve noticed that I used to get notifications on my phone. I don’t anymore, but I still get notifications when I’m actually online on Facebook. And that somebody going live, I actually get a notice notification. So you’re going to get in front of a certain percentage of your audience for free by doing Facebook live or Instagram live.

And you don’t have to pay the advertising fee. So what might you talk about using Facebook live? YouTube and YouTube work roughly the same way. So what would you talk about? I would have to say you could talk about anything that’s interesting that’s happened in the neighborhood. Like a neighborhood update. What I would do if I was really interested in doing a live broadcast, I would probably pay more attention to my neighborhood. What’s that one called? That it’s not neighborhood scout. It’s um, it’s a huge neighborhood. It’s like neighborhood.com I think it is. Yeah.

Jonathon: You have gone blank.

Robert: Hold on. I’m actually just going to neighborhoods next door. Yeah, next door. Yup. Yup. It’s absolutely it. So next door is a social media platform that is specifically for neighborhoods. Okay. It’s nationwide and you can go on there. You can see like, are all your neighbors talking about somebody stole my goddamn trash can. Again, somebody broke into the car, five houses. Did you hear that John over on westerly had a heart attack? So you pick and choose stuff that you think is interesting off neighborhood. You do a live broadcast and you kind of do. You can do one of two things. You can do a market update and you or you could combine neighborhood news with an update for everybody in terms of how you think this news might impact the housing market in a specific neighborhood, which is probably most of the time be not at all, but you could say, hey, this home got broken into.

For those of you that are interested in real estate that may impact your housing, your home prices. Another interesting thing about next door is that local police adjuncts are connecting in with the platform and what they’re doing is they’re saying, if any neighbors have information about this crime, report it here. So actually there’s, here in California, there’s a lot of police that are actually on this thing asking for news about local crime and stuff like that. So if it was me, I would leverage, I would do it like double utilize social media and I’d use next store to get really good kind of Gooey interesting details about neighborhoods. And then I do a live broadcast to all of my business-related real estate connections and kind of say this is going on in the neighborhood. And so I think it would impact the real estate market.

Jonathon: Kind of. I’m on the same subject. There’s a lady, I do who she is. She comes on my radar though when I’m on Facebook and she seen a totally different sector, but it’s something I think our listeners and viewers could learn from Robert. Is that she sells clothing this lady. But she sells it from her home in southern California. And she does every Wednesday choose a select 8 bits of clothing.

And then she shows how you can mix and match the clothing. And how her, she’s a kind of clothing consultant. So the clothes that she sells at higher wealth ladies at a certain price point, but she shows them how to mix and match the clothing that she’s selling. And she does it every Wednesday and then she does on Friday and she’s been doing this a year. And I think that she’s, I don’t know for sure but I think she’s brought the sounds of it. She’s got a reasonable business. I think you could do something similar in real estate. You could, I think it’s a good idea to do it at the same time every week. do quick 15, 20 live video about the market, about certain properties that have come on the market. talk about how the market’s going and by also show a lot of listings. And actually be, if you got a listing that you’re representing be in it when you’re doing the video as well but be consistent about the time that you do it. What do you think about that?

Robert: I think that would be brilliant. I also just want to let everybody know that updated its features a bit. Actually I’m looking at there’s a whole tab dedicated to real estate. One of the interesting things that I’m finding on here right now in this very second is that listings that may not be on other platforms are here. And there’s like a good like healthy price range. Anyway, I think that it’s a, it’s an interesting. Anyway, I liked your idea. I like this one too.

Jonathon: Well we had bought next door out a few months ago, so the brain when you brought you up. But basically also amazed the amount because you can set in a neighborhoods group. And in any gorilla focus real estate agent that doesn’t set up that there isn’t a group for the local community. There are farm areas. You should set you up on that platform. And because it ain’t going to cost you any money. And it really enables you to become. And I think they are okay. If you pull up you’re a recent listing, you’ve got in that area. But what you mustn’t do is start really pushing your services because you’re going to be barred from that platform. And secondly, it just won’t go. It’s just not appropriate marketing technique for that particular space. On the other hand, nobody’s covered that area. You should consider it, shouldn’t you?

Robert: You should. And there’s an event section on here. You actually did bring this up and interestingly enough, it tags you tags the area that you’re in. So this is most going to be mostly effective for your home area. But interestingly enough, you can add events for free. So if you’re doing that neighborhood marketing tactic that I mentioned earlier, you could do an event I like a bake sale or something creative or clever. Or hey, another way to collect leads is to help a current client do a moving sale. Why would you do that? Because when all the neighborhood neighbors come there, you can introduce yourself to them. I want to emphasize that these are guerrilla tactics for realtors who are just getting started. I’m not talking about like you’re an experienced realtor who doesn’t probably have time to do these kinds of things.

I just want to mention that this is something that I would do if I was trying to get my brand new career off the ground and I had more time than money. Anything else? So if I managed to call all my friends and family and somebody says, okay, I’ll give a listing to you. I personally would try to figure out like nine or 10 different ways I could possibly leverage that listing into a list of other people that would be my sphere. John and I talk about this all the time, creating databases, creating email lists, things like that. So when you’re focused on the neighborhood, if you get a single family member to list a home that literally, if you do it right, it should be the start of your entire career. You could figure like, so you help them move out. And when you’re there and you’re, you’re doing it. You’re being friendly with a handful of business cards and maybe a signup sheet.

You could figure out a way to, give something away. I don’t know, but definitely meet neighbors and say, hey, I’ve got this listing. I’m helping them move out. If you’d like this kind of exceptional service, maybe if you’re going to think of moving in the next year or two, maybe I can give you my card and maybe you can give me your email address and I promise I won’t be too overly aggressive. That’s what I would do. I just start up a conversation and say, do you want white glove service like this? I have all the drive in the world and not enough people to serve. So you utilize that.

Jonathon: Just to finish off these three elements, what you’re trying to achieve here. Obviously you’re trying to get some listings. Obviously no listings, no commission, no commission. You can’t stay in the real estate business. If it’s a full time occupation for you. So you’ve got to get yourself out there and people say to me, how can I get out there if I’ve got no listings of this chicken and egg situation? Well that’s not the case because through open houses and also promoting other people’s listings effectively through these guerrilla methods that we’ve just described will result in you getting listings. Cause you’re getting yourself out there. If you’re the secret agent that’s not out there, you will not get any listings. Will you?

Robert: I’m sorry Jonathon.

Jonathon: A lot of people are the secret agent. The other factor is to build up your database of emails, names, phone numbers, and emails. Like I said in the previous show it is the 101 of the red book. And it’s really the 101 of real estate. And your brokers are going to constantly be on your back on that. And they’re right in some way, but you should control that list. Using these techniques helps with that. And finally and thirdly. You’re in the market to build up a personal brand. Obviously you’ve got to get leads and you’ve got to get seller leads or buying leads. But you’re also there to build up your brand. So they’re the main three things why you should be doing the things that Robert and I have pointed out. I think it’s made a good show, Robert. I’ll call it day before you die. How can people find out more about you and what you’re up to and your words of wisdom?

Robert: They can always come and check me out at inboundrem.com. Everybody thank you for your patience with me today. It was a struggle. John. Thank you for your patience. I appreciate it.

Jonathon: I thought we covered some great stuff and you weren`t too bad. Also I had what Robert has had about a month, about three weeks ago and it’s terrible. I feel ill for a little while. If you want to find out more about me, go to the Mail-Right website. There’s a link right on all the pages in the top right hand corner where you can book a demo of Mail Right. And those demos are done by me. And I’ll go through the whole system with you and you can see the power of our marketing plan online platform with Mail Right. We will be back next week with another show. Just me and Robert or with a guest, and we’ll see you next week, folks. Thanks a lot. Bye.